DUBLIN
(AP) — Ireland ignored the mistreatment of thousands of women who were
incarcerated within Catholic nun-operated laundries and must pay the
survivors compensation, Prime Minister Enda Kenny said Tuesday in an
emotional state apology for the decades of abuses in the so-called
Magdalene Laundries.

“By any standards it was a cruel, pitiless
Ireland, distinctly lacking in a quality of mercy,” Kenny said, as
dozens of former Magdalenes watched tearfully from parliament’s public
gallery overhead.

Kenny told lawmakers his government has
appointed a senior judge to recommend an aid program for the
approximately 1,000 women still living from the residential workhouses,
the last of which closed in 1996. He also pledged government funding for
the erection of a national memorial “to remind us all of this dark part
of our history.”

A government-commissioned report published two
weeks ago found that more than 10,000 women were consigned to the
laundries after being branded “fallen” women, a euphemism for
prostitutes, even though virtually none of them were — and instead were
products of poverty, homelessness and dysfunctional families. More than a
quarter were directly referred by public officials, such as judges or
truancy officers, and all spent months or years in menial labor without
access to education. Most did laundry for local hotels, hospitals and
prisons, while others scrubbed floors or made rosary beads for the
church’s profit.

“The Magdalene women might have been told that
they were washing away a wrong, or a sin. But we know now — and to our
shame — they were only ever scrubbing away our nation’s shadow,” Kenny
said. “I believe I speak for millions of Irish people, all over the
world, when I say we put away these women because, for too many years,
we put away our conscience.”

Kenny’s voice faltered with sorrow as
he neared the end of his address and addressed the former Magdalenes
directly. “As a society, for many years we failed you. We forgot you or,
if we thought of you at all, we did so in untrue and offensive
stereotypes. This is a national shame, for which I say again: I am
deeply sorry and offer my full and heartfelt apologies,” he said.
Lawmakers and spectators applauded.

Opposition leader Micheal
Martin, whose Fianna Fail party in government refused calls to
investigate the state’s role in the laundries, said Ireland spent
decades treating the Magdalene women as shameful outcasts. “They
continued to live and work in conditions which were morally unacceptable
and should have been stopped,” he said.

Tuesday’s
state apology marks another step in Ireland’s two-decade effort to come
to grips with the human rights abuses committed in Catholic-run
institutions following Ireland’s independence from Britain in 1922, when
the fledgling state gave church authorities substantial authority over
the education of the young and care for the poor.

Over the past
decade Ireland has published five investigations into the church’s
serial cover-up of crimes by pedophile priests in the Dublin Archdiocese
and two rural Catholic dioceses; the sexual, physical and psychological
abuse of tens of thousands of children consigned to state-funded
industrial schools since the 1930s; and now, as a final piece of that
puzzle, the Magdalene laundries.

A taxpayer-funded compensation
fund established in 2002 has already paid out more than €1 billion ($1.3
billion) to more than 13,000 former residents of the industrial
schools, but the previous Fianna Fail government refused to extend that
aid to former Magdalenes, arguing that the laundries were private
businesses beyond the state’s control or responsibility.

This
month’s approximately 1,000-page report disproved that claim, finding
that 26 percent of laundry workers were sent there directly by state
authorities, while the approximately dozen laundries all were subject to
regular government inspections. Advocates for the women say they should
have received pay and retirement pensions but instead lived lives
closer to slaves, locked into their rooms at night and often bewildered
as to why they were even there.

And Kenny said after meeting
groups of former Magdalenes in Dublin and London last week, “I have come
to the view that these women deserve more than this formal apology,
important though it is. I also want to put in place a process by which
we can determine how best to help and support the women in their
remaining years.”

He said the president of Ireland’s Law Reform
Commission, Judge John Quirke, has been tasked with producing by May a
compensation program for former Magdalenes to include cash payments, and
access to free medical care and counseling. “The government will
establish a fund to assist the women based on his recommendations,” he
said.

Pressure groups have called for the government to provide
each former laundry resident payments of €50,000 to €100,000 ($67,000 to
$135,000) and full state pensions, a difficult bill for an Ireland
struggling to reduce a 15 percent unemployment rate, slash deficits and
escape from its 2010 international bailout.

Replies

I had never heard of the workhouse system until recently when I was watching an episode of Call the Midwife (a BBC show about midwifery in 1950s England). Apparently this was a social program that was widespread in the UK and had government, and religious involvement (both Protestant and Catholic). So much suffering! I will pray for healing all involved. I found this article that contains quotes from some of the survivors. It seems that the nuns had good intentions but there will always be individuals who sin. It was interesting that some noted that the media accounts are making claims that did not apply to them.

"It has shocked me to read in papers that we were beat and our heads shaved and that we were badly treated by the nuns. As long as I was there, I was not touched myself by any nun and I never saw anyone touched and there was never a finger put on them. … Now everything was not rosy in there because we were kept against our will … we worked very hard there … But in saying that we were treated good and well looked after. "

I had never heard of the workhouse system until recently when I was watching an episode of Call the Midwife (a BBC show about midwifery in 1950s England). Apparently this was a social program that was widespread in the UK and had government, and religious involvement (both Protestant and Catholic). So much suffering! I will pray for healing all involved. I found this article that contains quotes from some of the survivors. It seems that the nuns had good intentions but there will always be individuals who sin. It was interesting that some noted that the media accounts are making claims that did not apply to them.

"It has shocked me to read in papers that we were beat and our heads shaved and that we were badly treated by the nuns. As long as I was there, I was not touched myself by any nun and I never saw anyone touched and there was never a finger put on them. … Now everything was not rosy in there because we were kept against our will … we worked very hard there … But in saying that we were treated good and well looked after. "

Nope...just that in the particular case of the woman quoted below, she admits that her story was misreported...so, the media is trying to sensationalize that all women involved in the laundries system experienced abuse, when that is not the case...there were some who were benefited by that social net who might have ended up on the streets prostituting themselves to get shelter and food...we will never know the full truth because the majority of the Magdalenes are dead but of the ones who are living, some are saying they were not mistreated.

Quoting mikiemom:

So you are are claiming the women who reported abuse lied?

Quoting luvmygrndhg:

I had never heard of the workhouse system until recently when I was watching an episode of Call the Midwife (a BBC show about midwifery in 1950s England). Apparently this was a social program that was widespread in the UK and had government, and religious involvement (both Protestant and Catholic). So much suffering! I will pray for healing all involved. I found this article that contains quotes from some of the survivors. It seems that the nuns had good intentions but there will always be individuals who sin. It was interesting that some noted that the media accounts are making claims that did not apply to them.

"It has shocked me to read in papers that we were beat and our heads shaved and that we were badly treated by the nuns. As long as I was there, I was not touched myself by any nun and I never saw anyone touched and there was never a finger put on them. … Now everything was not rosy in there because we were kept against our will … we worked very hard there … But in saying that we were treated good and well looked after. "